Donald Trump and North Korea: What a Fine Mess

In a case of diplomatic whiplash, President Trump has gone, in short order, from ridiculing North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, and threatening to destroy his country, to accepting Mr. Kim’s invitation for a face-to-face meeting within two months, the first between leaders of the two countries.

We have long encouraged Mr. Trump to pursue negotiations to resolve the danger of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, rather than threatening war, and the United States should make the most of this opportunity.

And this is the rare time in which he is upending Republican politics in a sensible, not disastrous, way. Talking to our global adversaries, rather than playing tough with them, has been anathema to the party for years.

Mr. Trump, though, is following in the footsteps of the Republicans’ favorite demon, President Barack Obama, who was criticized for negotiating the nuclear deal with Iran. Like Mr. Obama, Mr. Trump has decided that such talks can be in the country’s best interests.

But the precipitous way in which Mr. Trump agreed to the invitation, and the fact that this mercurial president, ill informed and ill prepared on complex national security issues, will be across the table from Mr. Kim is worrisome.

As proposed under the invitation formally conveyed at the White House on Thursday by South Korean officials who had met Mr. Kim, Mr. Trump would have only several weeks to prepare.

Mr. Kim and his government, with a foreign minister and several vice ministers expert on the United States, have been plotting their diplomatic initiatives, including a charm offensive at the Olympics in South Korea and a conciliatory New Year’s speech, for months. He has been sending signals his nuclear program is advanced enough that he can turn his attention to his economy.

Mr. Trump’s administration, meanwhile, has done virtually nothing to prepare for talks, having been focused on tightening sanctions against the North and planning for war. There’s been little coordination between the White House and the State Department, which has been gutted and marginalized under Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. What’s more, the chief envoy to North Korea just retired, and there is no ambassador to South Korea, leaving the administration with few experts capable of steering the complex portfolio.

Maybe such an unorthodox summit meeting between two leaders with a flair for the dramatic will be hugely successful; it could also collapse in failure, making it a very high-stakes gamble for Mr. Trump.

The North Koreans have been seeking a meeting with an American president for decades, yet Mr. Trump agreed to one without getting anything in return.

And it didn’t take long for the chaos and mixed messaging that has long characterized Trump policy to resurface Friday when Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, seemed to back away from the summit meeting, insisting it wouldn’t take place unless North Korea first took concrete steps toward denuclearization. Of course, that didn’t last. Later, a White House official told The Wall Street Journal, “The invitation has been extended and accepted, and that stands.”

The planned session builds on an agreement, announced this week, for the United States and North Korea to hold their first sustained direct talks in many years. After a period of aggressively testing nuclear devices and missiles, Mr. Kim opened the door to talks by promising to discuss ending his nuclear program if America guarantees the North’s security. He agreed to suspend nuclear and missile tests during the talks and not to object when the United States and South Korea hold military exercises this spring.

Many assumed the next step would be preparatory talks in which experts from each side would test the other’s intentions and then enter into lengthy formal negotiations. What happens now is anybody’s guess.

A White House official provided Trumpian bluster on Thursday, saying that “we’re not even talking about negotiations” but rather a meeting between Mr. Trump, who “made his reputation on making deals,” and an authoritarian North Korean leader who has the power to make decisions and therefore avoid the “long slog of the past” negotiations. But the long slog of negotiations has a purpose, allowing the two sides to stake out positions, sometimes in public, then horse-trade privately as they search for a mutually acceptable bottom line. There is reason summit meetings are usually saved for the end, when leaders can give the last push to make a deal happen.

Let’s hope that responsible American officials are not approaching the talks with a serious belief in the skills of a businessman whose impetuousness helped lead to several bankruptcies and who revealed sensitive intelligence secrets to Russian officials during an Oval Office meeting.

On Twitter, Mr. Trump seemed optimistic that North Korea’s promise to discuss denuclearization means the North actually would abandon the nuclear program, which includes more than 20 nuclear warheads, an arsenal of missiles and facilities for producing nuclear fuel with both enriched uranium and plutonium. Many experts doubt Mr. Kim will ever give up his nuclear weapons, and one question is whether Mr. Trump could ever accept a compromise, as Mr. Obama did with the Iran nuclear deal that Mr. Trump is threatening to renege on.

Starting in 1994, during Bill Clinton’s presidency, North Korea froze its plutonium program for eight years in return for heavy fuel oil, but that was before it had nuclear weapons. Both Pyongyang and the George W. Bush administration contributed to the deal’s collapse.

So far, Mr. Trump is insisting his “maximum pressure” campaign of sanctioning and isolating North Korea will continue, and there is no indication of what, if anything, he might be willing to give North Korea if it limits the nuclear program in a verifiable way. Pyongyang’s oft-stated demands include an end to sanctions, the removal of American troops from South Korea and the replacement of the Korean War armistice with a formal peace treaty.

Some have argued that Mr. Trump shouldn’t meet Mr. Kim because doing so validates a ruthless ruler. The problem is not so much meeting with adversaries but what you do with that encounter. Mr. Trump has a lot of serious work to do before that day comes.